Fahrenheit 451 (Spanish Language Edition) (Spanish Edition) (original 1953; edition 2006)

So glad to have re-read this after so many years. Not so much about censorship as about without time to stop and think. Quite prescient of Bradbury, given the place of (multi)media in today's American society.

The start of this was good, but then it got a little slow after Clarisse disappeared. However, after Part 1, it really took off and the ending was not at all what I was expecting. Bradbury expresses some amazing view through some very poetic prose. ( )

Fahrenheit 451 is a classic SciFi novel that has not been diminished over time. Written in the 1950's it's message is even more relevant now than it was then. Ideas and those that pursue them are worth protecting at all costs. When those in power attempt to take away our freedom to think and create new ideas then all society is lost.

Bradbury reduces the concept of control of ideas to the symbolic burning of books. That this has happened too often in our past is frightening no matter what the 'justification' of those with the matches. It is not as simple as a battle against censorship, it is a battle against those who will say “ my way of thinking about this is superior to yours, yours will no longer be seen or heard”.

The protagonist, Guy Montag, begins this Novella gleefully spraying flames from his fire hose over
a pile of books and the house that once secretly held them,
“It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history”

The title, Fahrenheit 451, is apparently the temperature that books will burn. That is the symbolic number of Montag's helmet.

Yet for all the pleasure Montag feels when burning the books he is still not fully indoctrinated into this current attitude to books as evil that must be destroyed. For he has a secret, hidden in the ventilator grill in his house. Montag's transformation from passive disobedience to active begins with his first contact with the young girl, Clarisse McClellan. Her simple but direct questions start Montag into thinking. Something he had not done for years, if ever. Clarisse is not subversive and indeed her questions and observations seem to us now as simple and obvious. To Montag however they open his eyes to what a sham life he has been living.

His wife, Mildred, has been absorbed into the false reality of the Picture Walls that projected entertainment and became her reality.
“Well, wasn’t there a wall between him and Mildred, when you came down to it? Literally not just one wall but, so far, three! And expensive, too! And the uncles, the aunts, the cousins, the nieces, the nephews, that lived in those walls, the gibbering pack of tree-apes that said nothing, nothing, nothing and said it loud, loud, loud.”
Entertainment had been sped up and exaggerated to fill in the void thinking and talking used to occupy. Road rules were non existent, deaths in sport were common and glossed over. As Clarissa tells Montag,
“Being with people is nice. But I don’t think it’s social to get a bunch of people together and then not let them talk, do you? An hour of TV class, an hour of basketball or baseball or running, another hour of transcription history or painting pictures, and more sports, but do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don’t; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing, and us sitting there for four more hours of film-teacher. That’s not social to me at all. It’s a lot of funnels and a lot of water poured down the spout and out the bottom, and them telling us it’s wine when it’s not. They run us so ragged by the end of the day we can’t do anything but go to bed or head for a Fun Park to bully people around, break windowpanes in the Window Smasher place or wreck cars in the Car Wrecker place with the big steel ball. Or go out in the cars and race on the streets, trying to see how close you can get to lampposts, playing ‘chicken’ and ‘knock hubcaps.’ I guess I’m everything they say I am, all right. I haven’t any friends. That’s supposed to prove I’m abnormal. But everyone I know is either shouting or dancing around like wild or beating up one another. Do you notice how people hurt each other nowadays?”

Montag starts to think and is disturbed by where his thoughts take him. He knows things are not right but has no idea what do do about it. A chance encounter with an elderly man, Faber, sets Monatag off into active disobedience and when he is forced to burn his own home Monatag cannot turn back.

As Faber tells Montag,
“said Montag, eyes shut. “Where do we go from here? Would books help us?
“Only if the third necessary thing could be given us. Number one, as I said, quality of information. Number two: leisure to digest it. And number three: the right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two.”

Montag eventually meets up with like minded people whose solution is to remember all the lost books. So that when the situation improves they can be ready to divulge all their memories and start again. However this is no panacea ...
“when we had all the books we needed, we still insisted on finding the highest cliff to jump off. But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.”

There is much more to absorb in this compact Novella. I highly recommend to all, not just lovers of SciFi. ( )

In a future (2050s?) United States where all books are illegal, Guy Montag is a fireman whose job it is to burn books and the houses of people caught with books. Dissatisfied with his life, he grows curious as to what it is about books that makes people run such risks.

Classic SF story from the early 1950s about the ultimate dumbed-down dystopia. Bradbury has a beautiful literary writing style. ( )

This book has, without a doubt, the most twisted plot I’ve ever read about. Not twisted, exactly – more like ironic – it’s a book about burning books. It’s a book about one lone man’s struggle towards happiness, and the discovery that he is not alone after all. It’s about the true meaning of a book, and why people would fight to the death to preserve their fragile existence.

I loved – love – Fahrenheit 451. Its name is so symbolic and so self-explanatory – 451°F or 232.778°C is when paper burns, and since this book is about people burning book, I think I’ll leave you to figure the connection out. The style in which it is written is so dramatic – the use of short sentences and quick scenery changes only serve to accentuate the action and confusion the Guy Montag was feeling throughout the whole book.



Montag’s life would have been so much better without Mildred. Never mind that she interacts with her ‘family’ in her ‘parlour’ the whole day whilst he is out there earning money to pay the bills. Never mind that he was the one who called the doctors when she overdosed on sleeping pills, the one who worried about her as she lay there, unmoving. Never mind that all he ever asks of her is to read a book with him. She still turns him in – her own husband - when she decides, for some reason, that he isn’t good enough for her and she had put up with his nonsense long enough. Oh no, she just literally drives off into the sunset without so much as a ‘goodbye’ to the man who ensured she didn’t have to lift a finger in her everyday life.

When I first started reading this book – or rather, when I added it to my ‘to-read’ list, I expected it to be a sci-fi dystopian novel – no more, no less – but it became so much more. It became a question on what made us happy. It became a question on why I read. It became a question on my life – do I notice the tiniest details of life like Clarisse does, or do I just blunder my way through, noting nothing but what is required of me? Am I full of zeal for life, or am I just simply tired of it to the point I will bait someone to kill me, like Beatty?

This book made me ponder all these things. I’ve probably scared you off now, haven’t I, with all this talk of philosophy? You probably are just scrolling through the reviews to see if you should give the book a shot, or to see whether you should continue reading the book, and I’ll bet that you’re thinking to yourself: it sounds like a deep, philosophical book and I don’t want that – I merely wanted something to pass my time with!

Well, what can I say to soothe your fears? I won’t say that all your fears are for naught, because they aren’t – this book does get you thinking about a lot of things your previously took for granted – but I’ll say that after finishing this book, I felt that it’s worth its weight in gold. This is a book that I don’t regret spending my time reading, a book that I have no doubt I will enjoy equally, if not more ten, fifteen, even twenty years into the future.
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